Teacher Explains: Why Your Student Could Discover a Brand New Algae Species No One Has Named Yet
The mosquitoes were bad that afternoon in late May, and half my 7th grade science class was begging to head back to the building before the final bell. One boy’s sneaker was still caked in mud from where he’d stepped too close to the edge of the school pond, and a crumpled Sour Patch Kids bag was tangled in the cattails by my feet. I was already checking my email on my phone, ready to blow the whistle to wrap up our annual biodiversity walk, when Mia called me over. She was the quiet kid who always carried a chipped plastic magnifying glass in her backpack, and never raised her hand even when I knew she had the answer. She held up her clear jar, the water cloudy with green fuzz, and tilted it toward the sun. “Ms. Henderson,” she said. “This doesn’t match any of the algae in our field guide.”
I leaned in, squinted. Mia kept a terrarium of local pond life on the back shelf of my classroom, had been adding to it since September, so I was used to her bringing me weird things. I figured it was just a common strain she’d misidentified, so I told her to bring it back with us after break, we’d look it up together in the lab. Back in the classroom, we pulled up the free field guide from the state extension service, cross-referenced the shape of the cells, the way it clustered, the pH of the pond where she found it. Nothing matched. On a whim, I shot an email to the phycologist – that’s an algae biologist, I’d had to look that up too – at the state university who ran the local citizen science algae project, attached our photos and notes. I figured we’d never hear back. Three days later, he replied. The sample looked new, he said. Could we ship it down to his lab?
I’ve been teaching middle school science for 12 years, and for most of that time, I bought into the same story everyone else does: all the big, easy discoveries are already done. You need a PhD, a $100,000 microscope, a grant just to find something new. What I didn’t realize until Mia’s algae is how much of the natural world is still completely undescribed, especially the small stuff people don’t pay attention to. Algae is a perfect example. There are tens of thousands of known species, but biologists estimate there are another three or four times that still waiting to be named. Most labs don’t prioritize cataloging new freshwater algae, so it’s often amateur collectors and students who turn up the new ones.
Mia had always struggled with the way we do school. She got anxious on multiple choice tests, scored below grade level on our standardized science assessments, and would rather draw the things she found than write a lab report. A lot of teachers would have marked her as uninterested or not strong in STEM. But what she is good at is looking. She spends her afternoons walking the pond trail, notices when the green fuzz on the rocks looks different this year than it did last, something no one else – me included – ever catches.
That’s the first thing I tell other teachers and parents now. Stop making every kid’s science project follow a rigid formula. I used to require every biodiversity project to have a checklist of 10 identified species, a pre-written hypothesis, a formal conclusion. Now I set aside 25% of our project grades for “weird stuff documentation” – no hypothesis required, just tell me where you found it, when, what it looks like, and why it caught your eye. For parents, you don’t need a fancy lab to do this. Keep a $10 magnifying glass and a $1 spiral notebook in your car. When your kid stops to stare at the green slime in a puddle on your walk, don’t rush them to keep going. Ask them to jot down the date and where the puddle is, take a photo with your phone. If you don’t know what it is, don’t make up an answer or brush it off. Just say “That looks different from anything I’ve seen. Let’s send this to the state’s citizen science project.”
Most states have free online portals for biodiversity submissions, and biologists actually use the data. It’s not just a kid’s activity – it’s real research. If you’re not sure where to send unusual samples, check the biology department page of your nearest public university. Most have at least one grad student who jumps at the chance to look at a new sample, because they’re starved for data too. When we sent Mia’s sample, the professor told us he gets less than 10 amateur submissions a year, even in a state with hundreds of miles of freshwater ponds. Most people just don’t think to send anything in.
It’s been almost a year now. Mia’s algae is still going through the formal publication process, which can take up to two years for a new species. She proposed naming it after her grandma, who taught her to collect rocks and wildflowers when she was little, and the lab agreed. Mia still doesn’t get A’s on her multiple choice tests, and she still doesn’t raise her hand much in whole class discussions. She stops by my room every Friday during lunch to show me new samples she’s collected, and we look at them under the classroom microscope.
I don’t know if she’ll end up working in science when she grows up. That’s not the point, really. The point is, right now she knows that science isn’t a list of facts to memorize for a test. It’s just looking, and noticing, and asking “what is that?” There’s more out there than all of us will ever know, all waiting for someone to stop and look. Algae no one has named, fungi no one has documented, all in the pond behind your school, in the creek by your house. Any kid could find the next one.
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